For some of us reading about Manchester Arena attacker Salman Abedi is an unpalatable experience. He committed appalling crimes against the innocent.

Those directly affected by the attack have shown incredible dignity, and the city has shown remarkable resilience in the face of evil. The urge to look away from what led to that evil act, to move on as best we can from the atrocity, is strong.

But in order to understand evil, it’s necessary to look into its face, however difficult that might be. For that reason, we investigate the social, political and religious forces that led to the making of a monster.

No one is compelled to read what we publish here. In publishing it, we aim only to keep a record of what is so far understood about how the events unfolded. Ultimately, it’s only by understanding what led to the atrocity that we can prevent its like from happening again.

The mass murderer moved unnoticed among shoppers in the Arndale.

His face was partially obscured by the baseball cap he wore under a hood, but nothing else about him stood out. He bought a rucksack for £36.99 from Sports Direct.

Now we know that this Friday night shopper, whose movements were captured on grainy CCTV, was making the final preparations in a plot to slaughter innocents and kill himself in the process. The rucksack he bought was to carry a bomb, tightly packed with nuts and bolts, a powerful battery and a deadly compound.

“Each fragment is a weapon in its own right - it is like a hundred bullets coming out at once”, an expert told the Manchester Evening News, in the aftermath of the explosion.

Several months on from the atrocity at Manchester Arena and the fragments of Salman Abedi’s bomb continue to scar lives. Some of the affected have spoken publicly, untold numbers of others deal privately with the consequences; life-shattering loss, trauma and injury.

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The components​ of Abedi’s own life led to the appalling crime which he committed, and the deaths and injuries he caused. To understand how it happened, so it can be prevented from happening again, his life has to be put under the microscope.

Not ​just Abedi’s temperament, which we now know was marked by anger, and, by his final act, proven to be murderous. But also ​the ​climate he grew up in, his community and his family. A background of fundamentalist Islam, revolutionary politics and ties to known terrorists​, a radicalisation that may have started in the cradle, and then went unchecked​; a perfect storm of forces, personal and geo-political.

Manchester gave the Abedis a new life; work, friends, freedom and education for their four children

Salman Abedi was born on New Year’s Eve, 1994, weeks after his parents, Ramadan Abedi and Samia Tabba, settled in Manchester. Refugees from Libya, it was here that the Abedis found decent housing, work, friends, freedom to worship and education for their four children.

And yet, Salman Abedi would repay the city that had welcomed his family by killing 22 innocent people.

On the night of May 22, 2017, as American singer Ariana Grande performed Dangerous Woman, the last track of her sell-out Manchester Arena show, Salman Abedi was at the final stage of his twisted mission.

He had already called his mother in Libya, and told her ‘Forgive me for anything I have done wrong’. What crossed his mind as walked through Victoria Station and went up into the Arena’s foyer?

It was a school night. A Monday. The audience was mainly young and female, including kids who had been allowed to stay out late to see their favourite pop star.

Abedi was carrying the Karrimor rucksack he had bought in the Arndale on Friday night. It contained his lethal cargo, primed to explode. He had made the final preparations for the bomb in a flat at Granby Row, near the Gay Village. Police haven’t confirmed his exact movements, but know he spent hours walking around the city centre before heading to the Arena. Piccadilly train station is believed to have been a target he considered.

Once the show at the Arena was over, Abedi waited for the City Room lobby of the arena to fill up. Relatives of young people who had been to the gig were waiting in the area close to the main box office. Others came into the area as they made their way home.

They formed an unsuspecting ring around their killer. At 10.31pm, when he was sure he could cause maximum carnage, he triggered the detonator in his left hand.

Abedi ​knew the damage he would cause​. ​He had made the bomb himself, p​ut in months of surreptitious planning, shopped for ingredients, researched techniques online, and no doubt prayed - prayed in the perverse belief his actions were somehow justified.

The search for an answer spans continents - and reveals some uncomfortable truths

What led a young man, Manchester born and bred, to embrace a world view so warped is a question that ​has to be asked​. And, already, information ​has emerged​ which sheds some light on his dark trajectory.

The search for reasons why shines a light on uncomfortable truths, showing how foreign policy impacts on ordinary lives, linking events in Manchester with turmoil thousands of miles away.

It charts the development of Islamist terror, showing how a network of men with connections and sympathies for al-Qaeda were able get a foothold in Manchester as refugees, political asylum seekers and students.

It reveals how, in the years since, the warped ideology of ISIS has spread among youngsters in the southern suburbs of the city. It exposes the tangle of extremist factions that Abedi was brought into contact with by the tender age of 22. And it shows how the fall of a dictator 3,000 miles away in Libya has impacted all of us, incubating a new global terror threat.

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An unremarkable red-brick Manchester terrace... until the black flag appeared on the roof

On the morning of May 23, Manchester woke up to the beginnings of a heatwave - and the awful news of mass murder in the city.

The Real IRA bomb of 1996 left a large scar on the city centre’s landscape, but claimed no lives. This time the damage to the skyline was contained, but the human toll stretched as far as the Outer Hebrides.

The hopes of families searching for loved ones​, growing vainer and more heart-rending by the hour, dominated the news. Reporters from all over the world beat a path to the Abedi family home, as information trickle​d​ out about the perpetrator.

The killer and his three siblings, Ismail, Hashem and Jomana, grew up in a sixties red-brick terrace, on Elsmore Road on the Fallowfield estate, west of Wilmslow Road’s studentland. In the months before the bomb, with his parents and younger siblings in Libya, and his brother Ismail marrying and moving away, Salman Abedi lived in the house alone.

“About two years ago there was a black flag on the roof with Arabic writing on it”, a neighbour told the Manchester Evening News.

The two deaths, and one conviction, that helped shape Abedi's mind

The Black Standard, or Black Banner, is a flag with origins in the early days of Islam. In recent years modern, inscribed versions of the flag have been co-opted by Islamist groups, like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and more recently ISIS.

Groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS operate like cults, preying on people’s difficulties and normalising perverse values. As well as social and mental problems, unsettling life events can make people more susceptible to their rhetoric, radicalisation experts believe.

In May 2016, three events of this kind occurred in Salman Abedi’s life, in a period of just eight days. Firstly, one of his friends, Abdalraouf Abdallah, was jailed for terror offences in London. Then another mate, Abdul Hafidah, was stabbed to death in a gang murder in Moss Side. Finally, a third lad he knew, Raphael Hostey, was killed in a drone strike while fighting for ISIS in Syria.

Of course, for some troubled youths, growing up in communities where gangs and extremists are grim realities, having a friend killed in drone strike, or stabbed to death in the street, might act as a ‘wake-up call’. They might run as fast as they can from violence, from crime and religious fanaticism.

But Salman Abedi’s conditioning led to him reacting differently. He saw his friends as victims of enemies of Islam. He saw Manchester as deserving of revenge for their fate, and the fate of children dying in Middle Eastern wars, and he considered it his duty to take revenge.

He believed it was religiously sanctioned to use violence against ‘enemies of Islam’, and that no one, not even a little girl at her first pop concert, was an innocent. All ‘infidels’, in his warped worldview, were fair game for violent attacks.

In some cases the development of that mindset is the result of grooming from street preachers, or hours spent watching extremist videos. But in Salman Abedi’s case it was a mindset that was years in the making, because he grew up immersed in the idea of Holy War.

How Manchester became a battleground between Libyan liberals and extremists

“Manchester is full of Libyan extremists. They considered me an unbeliever and threatened my life", ​Reda Fhelboom ​says. His opinions will no doubt sound harsh to the many peace-loving, law-abiding Libyans in the city, but he’s a proud Libyan who lived here for 10 years, and he had some bad experiences.

The city’s Libyan community is nicknamed ‘Little Tripoli’. It grew as people fled Colonel Gaddafi’s regime. As a metropolitan city with a world-class university, Manchester was a natural destination for opposition intellectuals and activists seeking safe haven.

But Manchester’s Little Tripoli is divided - just as the nature of Gaddafi’s opposition was divided. Some are liberals, people like Reda and his friends, and some are Islamists, people who believe all public and political life should be guided by their religious principles. Some in this faction are ‘very conservative, more conservative than people in Libya’, according to Reda, who says Salman Abedi’s father, Ramadan Abedi, was a prominent member of this group.

While living in Cheetham Hill, Reda taught in Libyan supplementary schools. The schools were set up for families exiled from Gaddafi’s regime, in the hope that when the dictator fell and they were able to return, their kids would be up to speed with the curriculum. But, according to Reda, they became the battleground in a culture war.

Religious conservatives in the community insisted little boys and girls were segregated by gender, while women who refused to wear the hijab were prevented from teaching in some schools.

As a liberal who played pop music in his flat, spoke out against antisemitism, and challenged radical sermons in Manchester mosques, Reda was a natural enemy for this fundamentalist clique.

He tells us he was physically attacked and subjected to an internet hate campaign by fellow ​​exiles​ from his North African homeland. He says he warned the authorities of extremism in his community as far back as 2005, but nothing came of it. A man accused of attacking him and a friend in Crumpsall was acquitted at trial.

“I came back to Libya to spread democracy, human rights and the rule of law – values I learnt in Manchester – these people are against all these things. It was a matter of time before one of these extremists from the Libyan community in Manchester did something big”, he sa​ys​.

“They have the same beliefs as al-Qaeda and ISIS and kept themselves separate from British society. The sons have inherited the ideology from their family.”

Apart from the Libyan supplementary schools Reda speaks of, much of Salman Abedi’s education was spent in schools which were all male, largely Muslim, or both.

After school he enrolled at Manchester College. There, the hotheaded teenager got in a fight with a girl, punching her in the head after telling her the skirt she was wearing was too short.

“Too many youngsters - from all communities - grow up in a bubble, with a lack of understanding or empathy for other walks of life”, deradicalisation expert Ismael Lea South, who works with youngsters in Manchester, says.

“If ideas are not challenged, that can lead to extremist attitudes. Like ideas that if a girl wears a short skirt, it means she’s easy.”

A short skirt is something Ariana Grande often wears – along with a lollipop and a wink. Considering the attitudes of religious extremists about how women should behave, it’s unlikely to be a coincidence that the American pop star’s ‘Dangerous Woman’ tour was targeted by the bomber.

“I was really shocked when I saw the news, I still don’t believe it”, Ramadan Abedi said​ in Libya, after his son blew himself up at the pop concert​. “As we were discussing news of similar attacks earlier, ​(Salman) ​was always against those attacks, saying there’s no religious justification for them. I don’t understand how he’d have become involved in an attack that led to the killing of children. Every father knows his son and his thoughts, my son does not have extremist thoughts.”

And yet, despite Ramadan Abedi’s insistence that his son did not have ‘extremist’ thoughts, there is evidence that the father admired and venerated people who not only had extremist thoughts, but were active terrorists.

Didsbury Mosque: A diverse group of worshippers - including the bomber's family

Didsbury Mosque found itself at the centre of media attention after the Abedi family's connection to it emerged. For many years the Abedi family worshipped there, along with many other Libyans. They gravitated towards the building, the former Albert Park Methodist Chapel, because it conducted worship in Arabic, as well as English. At times Ramadan Abedi would summon the faithful with his recitation of the adhan - the call to prayer.

Didsbury Mosque say this was not an official position at the mosque, and that there's a tradition of the adhan being performed by the first person to arrive.

The mosque attracts a diverse range of believers. Among the Arab and Pakistani families there are converts - young white and black men, blending eastern and western dress styles, traditional shalwar kameez with Nike trainers. The Abedis, like many of the mosque's attendees, adhered to the conservative Salafi branch of Sunni Islam, which has spread throughout the Muslim world, and beyond, with the sponsorship of oil-rich Arab states like Saudi Arabia.

Rashad Ali, a counter-terror expert from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue , tells the Manchester Evening News Salafism is ‘radical, puritanical fundamentalism’.​ ​“It’s a growing problem in the country”, he adds.

A spokesman for Didsbury Mosque defended Salafism as 'misunderstood'.

Abdullah Yusuf, a spokesman told us: "There's nothing wrong with being a Salafi. Salafism is a school of thought, just like being a Protestant in the Christian religion. Didsbury Mosque welcomes Salafis - but people are not welcome if they are a terrorist, a murderer or a criminal. It concerns me if people have extremist views. But it does not concern me that people attend our mosque. The purpose of a mosque, of an Islamic centre is to guide people in the right way. It's better that they come to us, than a mosque that will guide them in the wrong way."

Salafism may be a 'school of thought', as Yusuf insists, for many law-abiding Muslims. However it is the same school of thought that al-Qaeda and ISIS seek to claim for themselves. The terrorists insist it is religiously sanctioned to use violence to enforce their fundamentalist principles. Analysts describe groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS as 'Salafi-Jihadi'.

“I don’t think their mentality is Jihadi”, Libyan community elder Mohammed Fadir said of Salman Abedi’s family. “When (Ramadan) came to the UK none of that came up. He never preached hate or violence and was just getting on with raising his family .”

But even if Ramadan Abedi wasn’t a Salafi-Jihadist​ himself​ - though ​other sources ​claim​ he was - there is compelling evidence that the bomber's father knew and respected some of Salafi-Jihadism’s ​most dangerous adherents. They were among his friends, neighbours and political allies. They were bonded by a hatred of Colonel Gaddafi, and the desire to replace his rule with Sharia law.

“He would have been executed if he stayed in Libya”, Fadir adds, speaking of the elder Abedi.

When Ramadan left his homeland in 1991, he had fallen foul of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. Accused of using his position as a government security official to leak information to anti-Gaddafi Islamists, Abedi first settled in Saudi Arabia. Like others from the Libyan dissident movement he would come to the UK, and settle close to south Manchester’s Wilbraham Road.

One of the Salafi-Jihadists Ramadan Abedi admired, and knew​ from the tight-knit Libyan​ ​dissident community ​in Manchester, was al-Qaeda commander Nazih Abdul-Hamed Nabih al-Ruqai’i, a man better known by the nom-de-guerre Anas al-Libi. The story of ​al-Libi, and how he came to be in Manchester is worth a closer look, for an insight into the murky geo-political currents​ that produced Salman Abedi.

Anas al-Libi: The Manchester link between Ramadan Abedi, Libya and al-Qaeda

The roots of the infamous terror group al-Qaeda go back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Osama bin Laden and other muhajideen (holy warriors) are said to have received US funding during the ten year fight against the occupation. However, veterans of the conflict went on to form jihadist groups - the most notorious of which was bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

Another group formed by veterans of the Afghanistan conflict was the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). The aim of the group was to pursue jihad against Gaddafi’s government in Libya and replace the regime with a sharia state. The LIFG’s shared origins with al-Qaeda meant that they were not only affiliated, but shared some high command.

Anas al-Libi , who settled in Manchester in 1995 and lived in a flat in Didsbury, was one of the jihadis believed to have straddled the LIFG and al-Qaeda, although he presented as a low-key student.

Al-Libi is believed by the US government to have been a close aide of Osama bin Laden who would act as his decoy on operations because of their similar height and bearing. Al-Libi was also an ally of Salman Abedi’s father Ramadan, who joined the LIFG in 1994, according to documents leaked by the Libyan government. Al-Libi, like Ramadan Abedi, is believed to have secured residency in the UK because of his opposition to Gaddafi’s regime.

In Manchester the two men were at the centre of a tight-knit, exile community with strong traditions of hospitality, brotherhood, and politicised religious fervour. Their wives had been friends since their college days in Tripoli, and they both had young families.

At the time when Anas al-Libi first came to Manchester, the Egyptian authorities suspected him of being part of an ​al-​Qaeda attempt to murder then-president Hosni Mubara​k​ and made an extradition request to the British government. The Egyptians told the British they believed al-Libi to be a high-level al​-​Qaeda terrorist, but ​the extradition request was refused ​on the grounds al-Libi would not get a fair trial.

The history of Libyan opposition to Gaddafi in Manchester... and why it matters

​​Until ​Colonel Muammar Gaddafi ​seized power in a 1969 coup, Libya had a pro-Western leader in King Idris, who had allowed the British and the Americans to establish military bases in the North African country in exchange for aid. But after taking power Gaddafi kicked out Western military and effectively nationalised the oil industry, leaving British investors millions out of pocket.

The relationship worsened as Libya went beyond supporting left-wing and anti-imperialist agendas and went violently rogue, with state-sponsored terrorism against Western targets occurring throughout the 1980s.

The 1984 murder of Pc Yvonne Fletcher, the bombing of a disco in West Berlin two years later, and the killing of 281 people, largely British and American, in the Lockerbie bombing, sealed the enmity between the West and Gaddafi’s regime.

But, in the LIFG and other Libyan Islamists, Gaddafi had a formidable enemy. His regime tried to put down the threat, opponents were jailed and put to death. But a number of Libyan Islamists, like Ramadan Abedi and his associates in the LIFG, fled the country for the UK where they could regroup in exile.

Shared opposition to the Gaddafi regime led to a dangerous alliance between the British government and these Libyan Islamist dissidents, according to colourful whistleblower David Shayler. After working on the Libyan desk of MI5, the former spy made ​the extraordinary allegation that MI6 had paid a Libyan al-Qaeda/LIFG cell around £100,000 in a thwarted 1996 plot to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi.

Anas al-Libi, Ramadan Abedi’s ally and fellow south Manchester resident was later named as being a member of this cell. It was ​​alleged he had been promised he could stay in Britain if it was successful.

The claims of an MI6 plot were dismissed by the then foreign secretary, Robin Cook, as ‘pure fantasy’. But Shayler would be prosecuted​ and jailed for breaching the Official Secrets Act.

Certainly, by the 1990s, a curious situation had developed where men suspected of being high-ranking al-Qaeda figures - were, because of their opposition to Colonel Gaddafi, claiming refugee status and political asylum in the UK. Not all of the LIFG were hardcore Islamists - for some it was merely the most effective way to oppose Gaddafi. Either way, Manchester was at the centre of the movement.

“All of the (LIFG) leaders lived in Manchester at one point”, Dr Omar Ashour, of the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, said.

Watch: Anas al-Libi is brought to the United States

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Al-Libi would eventually be arrested on suspicion of terror offences in 1999, before being released through lack of evidence. By the time police tried to to arrest him again in May 2000, he had fled his Didsbury flat, leaving behind an 180-page jihadist guide to the ‘overthrow of godless regimes’- a text which became known as the ‘Manchester Manual’.

By the mid-2000s, tolerance towards LIFG members in the West was evaporating. Al-Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 attack on New York’s World Trade Center, killing nearly 3,000 and injuring over 6,000, had sealed al-Qaeda’s global infamy, putting its network of allies under much greater scrutiny.

“The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group threatens global safety and stability through the use of violence and its ideological alliance with al-Qaeda and other brutal terrorist organisations”, an October 2006, US Treasury press release said.

“Following a Libyan government security campaign against LIFG in the mid to late 1990s, the group abandoned Libya and continued its activities in exile. The group is part of the wider al-Qaeda-associated movement that continues to threaten global peace and security....”

But, by that time, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group were already entrenched in Manchester. And, while al-Libi had fled Manchester, other Libyan dissidents with strong links to al-Qaeda remained in the city for years.

Men like Abd al-Baset Azzouz, a master bombmaker who lived on Wilbraham Road, a short distance away from the Abedi family. Azzouz came to the UK in the mid-nineties, just like Ramadan Abedi and Anas al-Libi. Azzouz would be arrested on suspicion of terror offences in 2006, but was released on bail and then fled the country.

Azzouz, who lived in Whalley Range, is presently subject to UN Security Council sanctions, which say he travelled to Libya in 2011 ‘to build a network of terrorist fighters’ and recruit ‘200 militants in the east of the country - he is a key (al-Qaeda) operative due to his ability to mobilize terrorist fighters and train recruits in skills like improvised explosive devices construction.’

Other links which draw together al-Qaeda, the LIFG, and Manchester have surfaced over the years.

An al-Qaeda cell was behind a 2009 plot to blow up the Arndale Centre. In 2015 in New York, a Pakistani student called Abid Naseer was jailed for forty years after being convicted of the Arndale plot, which would have targeted shoppers in Manchester city centre with car bombs and suicide bombs over Easter Weekend. An initial suspect in the case, a close associate of Abid Naseer, was living in a property let to him by a man accused by the US Treasury of being an LIFG financier.

Correspondence between Osama bin Laden and Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a top-ranking al-Qaeda commander and a leader of the LIFG featured in Abid Naseer’s trial. The letters were recovered when bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan was stormed by US Navy Seals, leading to the 9/11 mastermind’s death.

Abbottabad was also the hometown of the late Aslam Awan, who plotted attacks against the West, and groomed young men for terrorist training, while living in Cheetham Hill on a student visa between 2002 and 2006. Awan was suspected of being one of al-Qaeda’s most senior commanders when he was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan in 2012.

As for al-Libi - the Didsbury man and Abedi family friend who was Bin Laden’s body double - he would stay on the run until October 2013, when he was captured by US commandos in Tripoli. He was one of the FBI Most Wanted.

Ramadan Abedi, Salman Abedi’s father, knew of al-Libi’s arrest within hours. He posted an image of al-Libi on his Facebook page with the words: “The Prophet knows how many have a picture of this lion in their (Facebook) profiles. The weak are forbidden to share it.”

The man Ramadan Abedi was hailing as a ‘lion’ was suspected of having conspired in the al-Qaeda bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attacks which claimed 224 lives, and injured 4,500 people. But Al-Libi would never stand trial - he died in January 2015 of liver cancer, weeks before the hearing was to begin.

As the seeds of the Arab Spring are sown, a 'dislikeable' Manchester teenager is trying to cultivate a gangster image

By the end of the 2000s, the Islamist dissident group Ramadan Abedi belonged to, the LIFG, had been banned by the British government, had made peace with Gaddafi in Libya, renounced violence, officially distanced themselves from al-Qaeda and disbanded.

However the aims and Islamist inclinations of the some of the group’s former members never went away. And they were given new impetus by the Arab Spring of 2011, as their dream of a revolution in Libya finally came to pass.

Salman Abedi, at that time 16, was old enough to play a part in that revolution.

“If you are a Salafi and you couple that with an exposure to violence and warfare and revolutionary causes, that’s going to make you more vulnerable to being radicalised by ISIS​”, ​is how Rashad Ali, from the Centre for Strategic Dialogue think tank, puts it.

The teenage Salman Abedi studied at Wellacre Academy, in Flixton, before leaving as a Year 9 pupil in January 2009.

He continued his secondary schooling at Burnage Academy For Boys. Violence and the politics of integration is something seared into the memory of that school. In 1986, when it was still called Burnage High, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah, a 13-year-old boy, was stabbed to death in the playground by a fellow pupil in a racist attack.

While the tragedy was nationally infamous, the school has a proud history beyond it, producing successful men - including footballer Wes Brown, Stone Roses guitarist Aziz Ibrahim, and NFL star Menelik Watson. ​During his time ​at Burnage​, Salman Abedi was a less than stellar student.

“No signs of a young man that wanted to take life through the most callous and senseless of acts”, Mark Roberts, his former media studies teacher wrote in a piece for the TES.

“Instead, all I can give are banal anecdotes about a dislikeable boy who displayed average laziness, mediocre rudeness and refused to complete his coursework on time”.

With big ears, poor English, and slow academic progress, Abedi was nicknamed ‘Dumbo’ by other kids during his childhood. In 2008 his father returned to Libya under a scheme for returning exiles. The absence of his strict father provided Salman Abedi​ ​with new freedoms, ​but also left​ a vacuum in his life​ at a critical time.

“He was taking drugs and drinking, which is not acceptable in the Muslim community. But it’s a common issue”, Mohammed Fadir, who knew the family, told the Manchester Evening News.

Much like any other teenager, Salman Abedi liked clothes, music, football, parties and hanging around with his mates. A friend who spoke to the Mirror Online website vividly recalls his attempts to cultivate an image .

“He always tried to portray this image as a hard gangster type - wearing a large silver chain - but no-one was taken in. He had a bit of a giddy character and a very short attention span.

“I used to sit next to him in media studies and he was very nice when he wanted to be. But he had an insidious side to him.

“He stopped talking to me when he overheard a conversation and realised I was Sufi - different to him. His face went mottled, he was shocked and he barely spoke to me again.”

In that encounter Abedi was showing early signs of the religious intolerance that would propel him into killing innocents.

Sufis are Muslims who place emphasis on the mystic element of their faith - centuries ago the spread of Sufi philosophy coincided with the spread of Islamic civlisation.

But Sufism’s rich intellectual tradition of philosophy, architecture, art, astronomy and poetry is despised by Salafi-Jihadists, who have destroyed sites of religious and historical significance from Kashmir to Timbuktu.

And in Libya, following the revolution of 2011, Sufis and their shrines have been targeted by book-burning, grave-desecrating, hardline Islamists.

The ​Libyan ​revolution of 2011 would not only have tragic consequences for the country’s Sufis. It would seal Salman Abedi’s fate, leading to his appalling attack at Manchester Arena.

The 'Manchester Fighters' rushed to join the Arab Spring - as warning voices said it could have dire consequences for Europe

The Arab Spring was a wave of uprisings against regimes in the Middle East and North Africa, beginning with protests in Tunisia in late December 2010. Within weeks the president of that country had been ousted.

The first challenge to Colonel Gadaffi’s authority in Libya was in Benghazi in 2011. After violent crackdowns on peaceful protestors by the regime, including the shootings of scores of unarmed demonstrators, armed rebels took control of the city. Colonel Gadaffi’s son, Saif, condemned the protests as the work of Libyans in the West - singling out the Manchester community in a state TV diatribe.

The men of Manchester’s Libyan dissident community considered themselves leaders in exile, and saw their chance to overthrow Gaddafi, take up government positions, and refashion Libyan society in their image. Calling themselves the Manchester Fighters, they rushed to join the insurgency.

As the conflict unfolded, a number of Mancunians hit the headlines. The imam at Didsbury mosque, Mustafa Graf, ended up being captured in the north African country by pro-Gaddafi forces . Another Manchester Libyan, from Cheetham Hill, was also seized by the regime’s men, accused of fundraising for the LIFG, the dissident group Salman Abedi’s father had belonged to.

Events in Libya, like the rest of the Arab Spring, were welcomed by Western observers and pro-democracy campaigners as a new dawn for the region. But others - including Colonel Gaddafi himself, claimed other forces were gearing up to exploit the collapse of autocracy.

Days after the Libyan Revolution began, Colonel Gaddafi told Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had pursued a policy of rapprochement towards him, that his removal would benefit jihadis and have dire consequences for the West.

Transcripts released by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee reveal Gaddafi told Blair in two February 2011 phone calls: “They (jihadis) want to control the Mediterranean and then they will attack Europe....The story is simply this: an organisation has laid down sleeping cells in north Africa, called the al-Qaeda organisation in north Africa. The sleeping cells in Libya are similar to dormant cells in America before 9/11.”

NATO and David Cameron’s government would back the rebels against Gaddafi, intervening with air strikes on the basis they were needed to protect civilians in the rebel stronghold Benghazi from being massacred. Liam Fox, then defence secretary, has since admitted that the ‘disparate’ nature of the rebels meant ‘there was a view’ there would be some ‘extremist elements’.

Indeed, al-Qaeda welcomed developments in Libya. In a letter to Osama Bin Laden himself, Atiyah Abd al Rahman, senior al-Qaeda commander and founder member of the LIFG, wrote: “Brothers from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and others are out of jail. There has been an active Jihadist Islamic renaissance underway in Eastern Libya for some time, just waiting for this kind of opportunity.”

Dad makes a trip to Libya as Salman drifts into crime... and the sons are exposed to a new level of violence

After his father’s return to Libya, Salman Abedi hung around with a clique of youngsters from​ first and second generation​ refugee backgrounds. Libyans and Somalians, they sought their own identity on the street​s of south Manchester.​

Inspired by the mythology of the​ Moss Side​ gangs that started in the 1980s against the backdrop of joblessness, institutional racism and crack cocaine, the refugee boys formed their own gangs.

As friends Salman Abedi had grown up with drifted into crime, short-fused Abedi sought a reputation as a hardman, with one friend describing him as someone who​ ​‘would have fights for no reason​’.

In time​,​ Salman Abedi would be reunited with his father. The reunion involved exposure to a new level of violence. Ramadan Abedi is believed to have taken his sons with him to the frontline of the conflict. No-one wanted to be left out of the fighting.

A former classmate recalls Salman Abedi posting pictures of himself brandishing weapons on family holidays to the warzone. Abedi had once told him that he wanted to ‘kill Gaddafi with his own bare hands’.

Former members of the LIFG, and the associated Islamist militias they splintered into, were central to the eventual overthrow of Gaddafi. But amid the bitter fighting of a civil war involving a complex web of groups and interests, ​law and order has effectively collapsed in Western Libya, the area around the capital.

There is a proliferation of weapons, kidnapping is rife, inflation is high, and people traffickers have taken to selling migrants travelling through the nation into bondage. Jihadi militias are rife. This chaotic situation is thought to have played a key role in tipping the Manchester bomber over the edge.

“If you have been in Syria, or Libya during the anti-Gaddafi fighting then you could have got exposed to all sorts of radicalised groups. You may come back having fought against Gaddafi in a more radicalised position”, ​counter-terror chief Dept Supt Russ Jackson, of the North West Counter Terrorism Unit, said of Salman Abedi.

A look at Ramadan Abedi’s Facebook page, before it was taken down, offered a snapshot into the world of Islamist fighting brigades. The page was​ ​festooned with images of ​militiamen, and in one post the bomber’s father praised Salafi-Jihadists Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian arm of al-Qaeda who are fighting Bashar al-Assad in a bid to establish a sharia state.

“My greetings of peace to al-Nusra. May they be victorious against the infidels”, he said.

The Facebook page contains 72 images - the same number of virgins Islamic martyrs are promised in heaven - which is perhaps a coincidence. There’s an image of Salman Abedi’s younger brother, Hashem Abedi, posing with a semi-automatic weapon under the caption, ‘Hashem the lion...in training.’

‘The lion in training’ now faces trial in Libya accused of helping his brother Salman in the Manchester attack. Hashem Abedi was reportedly being investigated for a month-and-a-half before the arena bomb, suspected of links to IS and a cell planning an attack on a UN envoy.

Following his arrest after the bomb, Libyan authorities claim, Hashem said he ‘thought’ his brother was going to do something, and ‘knew’ it was him when he learnt of what happened.

Meanwhile a cousin, Mohamed Younis Abedi, is in custody amid allegations his credit card was used to pay for parts of the Manchester bomb. Ramadan Abedi has been arrested but released, with Libyan authorities saying they have no concrete evidence against him.

ISIS has spread terror in Europe - while winning over a close-knit network of sympathisers in Manchester

The proliferation of jihadist groups in Libya coincided with the rise of ISIS on Europe’s streets. Salman Abedi would have known of this network of ISIS sympathisers in Manchester and it would have further normalised his warped idea of religion, compounding the radicalising effect of having jihadist role models, and his experiences in the Libyan revolution.

ISIS, also known as Islamic State, began life as the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda, developing in the chaos that followed the US and UK’s toppling of Saddam Hussein. Then, in 2013, ISIS broke from al-Qaeda and expanded into Syria, as Bashar al-Assad’s autocratic, but relatively secular regime turned on its own citizens following the Arab Spring.

The following year, ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a caliphate, a sharia state. Westerners snatched by the group, like Salford charity volunteer Alan Henning, were beheaded on camera by Mohammed Emwazi, the masked British executioner nicknamed Jihadi John.

After seizing territory in the Middle East, ISIS set its sights on Europe. In late 2014 a series of attacks on European cities or resorts frequented by Westerners began. By 2015 they were occurring with alarming regularity - often perpetuated by fanatics who had been raised in the West and radicalised by the group’s slick online propaganda machine.

Paris, Copenhagen, Sousse, a Russian plane, and a train between Amsterdam and Paris were all attacked in 2015, with the bloodshed extending to Australia and the US, where a gunman murdered Christmas partygoers in San Bernadino, California.

Meanwhile street preachers and YouTube videos presented salafi-jihadism as a romantic lifestyle, one that was exciting, noble and virtuous - like that of a medieval knight. The propaganda promised a glorious future in the caliphate, and a place in heaven to bored and disaffected young people from urban areas.

Inner south Manchester, where Salman Abedi grew up, became home to a small jihadist youth subculture.

“For youngsters who have got in trouble, they see it as rehabilitation, others see it is as rebelling against the system​”, deradicalisation expert Ismael Lea South told the Manchester Evening News.

“Often you see ​someone who was brought up in a strict Muslim family, but then went off living the worldly life, smoking weed, going out with girls. All the positive things they learned about the religion when they were young they forget, it gets smoked away. They learn a negative version of Islam.”

Hashem Abedi is said by Libyan authorities to have told them that he and his brother Salman ‘got the ideology’ of ISIS ‘from the internet and some friends in the UK’.

While it’s clear the background and unique experiences of the two brothers mean their radicalisation was possible even without internet propaganda and the rise of ISIS in Manchester, it is a fact that a cluster of young people whose backgrounds criss-crossed with theirs have been linked to ISIS.

Among that group is Ahmed Halane, who was a couple of years above Salman Abedi at Burnage Academy. He is banned from returning to the UK because he is suspected of fighting with militants in Syria and Somalia after being radicalised online.

Halane’s twin sisters, Zahra and Salma Halane, were high-performing students who left their home in Chorlton to become ‘jihadi brides’ for ISIS fighters in Syria - they were in the same year as Abedi’s sister, Jomana, at Whalley Range High School for Girls, and would go on to star in ISIS propaganda videos.

The Halanes’ cousin, Abdullahi Ahmed Jama Farah, from Fallowfield, was an IS propagandist who helped another young man Nur Hassan , from Whalley Range, travel to Syria to fight alongside militants.

Both young men are associates of Anil Khalil Raoufi, from Didsbury. Raoufi flew to Syria with two friends, Raphael Hostey, from Moss Side and Mohammed Javeed, from Levenshulme. All three are dead - Raoufi in combat, Javeed in a suicide bombing, Hostey in a drone strike.

All three were helped to Syria by Javeed’s elder brother, Jamshed Javeed, a chemistry teacher from Levenshulme who was jailed for six years after his plans to join them were thwarted by police.

Having been helped to Syria by Jamshed Javeed, Raphael Hostey, who was known to Salman Abedi, became a senior commander and proflific recruiter for ISIS, promising recruits ‘beautiful wives’ from his base in Raqqa.

Meanwhile, Abdalraouf Abdallah, from Moss Side, who recruited for jihadists in Syria, is a family friend of the Abedis. When he was shot in the spine fighting in the Libyan Civil War, Ramadan Abedi urged friends to pray for his recovery on Facebook.

On his return to the UK for treatment, the now-paraplegic Raouf tried to help Mustafa Gray, an RAF veteran from Moss Side who converted to Islam, to join ​jihadis in Syria​. ​He also provided support to three others in the war zone, including his own brother Mohammed Abdallah, and Gray​‘s friend and fellow convert Ray Matimba, also from Moss Side.

Salman Abedi visited paraplegic recruiter Abdallah twice in Altcourse prison in early 2017 - at a time when he was preparing to bomb Manchester. What did they talk about? These visits now form part of the investigation into the atrocity.

By the time Salman Abedi detonated his bomb in Manchester on May 22, ISIS were in decline in their self-declared Caliphate. In Iraq, pro-government forces, with the help of a multinational coalition, were weeks from taking back Mosul, the country’s second-biggest city. And in Syria, Islamic State ceded ground to US-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters while Russian air strikes pounded the group’s infrastructure.

ISIS have opened up a third front however - in Libya, through Katibat al-Battar al-Libi (KTB), Libyan Islamist militiamen who, after the fall of Gadaffi, joined the battle against Assad in Syria, before returning home.

One line of investigation is that the Libyan civil war led to Salman Abedi building alliances with the KTB - whose slogan is ‘We Came to Slaughter You’ - before returning to ordinary life in Manchester.

Since the fall of Gaddafi the KTB have merged with ISIS. They now form the terror group’s shock troops - and have established a training camp in the coastal Libyan ​town of ​Sabratha, attracting Westerners as recruits.

A European intelligence source has reportedly claimed that in the weeks before the Manchester attack, Salman Abedi met with KTB operatives in Tripoli, and then in Sabratha, and stayed in contact with them on his return to Manchester in the build-up to the bomb. ISIS attacks in Berlin, Paris and the Tunisian resort of Sousse are all thought by security experts to bear the fingerprints of KTB operatives.

Manchester, and the Abedi family, have strong links to the post-Gaddafi government

Salman Abedi’s attack on Manchester caused revulsion amongst people in divided Libya, where the Abedis have links to high levels of post-Gaddafi government.

At the time of the Manchester bomb his father, Ramadan Abedi, was working for the department responsible for policing in Tripoli. Meanwhile Manchester University graduate Mohammed al-Amari, who lived in a neighbouring house to the Abedi family on Elsmore Road in Fallowfield, is now a senior minister in the Presidential Council of Libya’s Government of National Accord, the interim government formed under a United Nations intiative.

Al-Amari, like Ramadan Abedi and others who lived in south Manchester and worshipped at Didsbury Mosque, was part of the Libyan Islamist dissident movement. But the Government of National Accord which has given Islamists a political voice has a weak grip on power. Moves among some British politicians to support their rival, General Khalifa Haftar, may have caused yet more resentment towards Britain in the mind of Salman Abedi.

Haftar has control of Libya’s main oil terminals, and in the view of some politicians, offers some hope of getting to grips with the migrant crisis and defeating jihadism. But Islamists and Haftar are bitterly at odds.

In a report published in March for the Conservative Middle East Council, MPs Kwasi Kwarteng and Leo Docherty urged the government to urgently engage with Haftar, reconsider its relationship with the Government of National Accord, and criticised militias linked to the LIFG, saying, ‘they have a vested interest in prolonging the chaos...these militias reportedly derive significant income from the trafficking of migrants.’

Wearing robes, chanting in the street, eyes glazed... Salman Abedi was angry and, for much of the time, alone

Salman Abedi is described by people who knew him in different ways - but anger seems to be a recurring theme. It’s been reported that he told staff at Manchester College that he had ‘anger man​a​gement’ problems after he struck a fellow student.

It’s also reported - although the college denied there was a ‘flag’ against his name - that students reported him to staff in 2014 after he said he thought ‘ISIS and suicide bombers were OK.’

After the bomb - in comments that were met with outrage - Salman Abedi’s sister Jomana said: “I think he saw children - Muslim children - dying everywhere, and wanted revenge. He saw the explosives America drops on children in Syria, and he wanted revenge. Whether he got that is between him and God.”

Salman Abedi must have still had some hopes of a normal life in 2014, because he enrolled on a business management course at Salford University. He went to lectures for a couple of years.

But the pull of jihadist ideology was stronger. People who knew Abedi give colourful descriptions of him wearing ‘robes’ and chanting in the street, his eyes glazed, as he grew more and more radical. ​Hungry for scripture, he stayed after hours in a Moss Side mosque so he could access religious texts.​ He had already stopped going to Didsbury Mosque after accusing an imam who criticised IS of ‘talking bollocks’.

One neighbour, who spoke to the Manchester Evening News, recalled thinking ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he was ISIS’.

After Abdul Hafidah, a teenager from Manchester’s Libyan community, was killed in a 2016 gang murder, Abedi is said to have seen the murder as a hate crime and sworn revenge.

Relatives without Islamist leanings say he never explicitly expressed militant views to them - but sparked concern over his mental health as he became distant and stopped looking after himself’.

The moment armed police raided the Abedi home in Fallowfield

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By early this year Abedi had dropped out of university in order to prepare for the bomb, which he funded with his student loan. His slide into the jihadi mindset - that he was destined for martyrdom, that the UK was at war with Islam, and that civilian targets were legitimate - was complete.

T​hree months before the attack at Manchester Arena, Abedi went to Libya with his family for a wedding. Whatever sentiment he expressed to his parents, it was concerning enough, reportedly, for them to take his passport from him. He got it back by telling his mother he was going on pilgrimage to Mecca.

Instead, he returned to the UK, via Istanbul and Dusseldorf, the German city which is home to a number of Islamic militants, before returning to Manchester, days before the bomb.

By then, May 2017, Abedi had already established a network of addresses in Manchester where preparation for the bomb had been underway for some months. ​A flat in a tower block in the Charlestown area of Blackley was one of them - the landlord is said to have found a strong stench of chemicals after Abedi rented it for a short period in March. The electricity had been disabled and the smoke alarm had been disconnected. Cut up bits of material and a metal rod were found in the bath.

Significant materials were also covered from Abedi’s home at Elsmore Road, Fallowfield, where police carried out a controlled explosion the day after the bomb, and from his Nissan Micra, found later in Rusholme by investigators.

Bulky packages were seen being delivered to another flat Abedi kept in the city centre, at Granby Row, close to the Gay Village. Neighbours here noticed a strong smell of combustibles; Abedi is believed to have set out on from that address on the night of the bomb.

(Image: Louise Bolotin)

He had been intent on his course when he stepped off the plane from Libya on May 18. Police, in one of their biggest-ever investigations, are examining phone contacts, financial transactions, and CCTV in granular detail.

They have tracked his movements back. They know within minutes of his arrival from Libya he bought nuts and bolts for the bomb and the tin which the explosive was packed into. They have seen him, looking back through footage, lugging a blue suitcase back and forth to the Rusholme area where he was storing materials for the bomb, which he is understood to have assembled personally in the days just before the attack. For much of that time, he was alone.

Police cuts, community failings, foreign policy interventions... or a disastrous combination of all three?

Advanced in its planning and sophistication, Abedi’s attack was unique in the history of Manchester and terrorism, in the scale of loss of life.

More than 200 people were injured when the Provisional IRA detonated a 1,500kg bomb on Corporation Street in 1996, but there were no fatalities. In 2003, DC Stephen Oake was murdered in a knife attack by al-Qaeda operative Kamel Bourgass in Crumpsall, but no civilians were harmed. The 2009 al-Qaeda plot to attack Arndale Centre was foiled, and a string of people have been convicted of preparing for terrorist activity, facilitating terrorist activity overseas, and possessing documents useful for terrorism over the years.

“The lower end of reasonable” was how Greater Manchester’s Chief Constable, Ian Hopkins described police numbers in the wake of Abedi’s bomb. So have police cuts led to Abedi succeeding where others have failed? Paul Condon, a former Metropolitan police commissioner, said in a recent interview that the ‘contacts with the community (that) give you the leads’ could not be maintained if ‘20,000 street cops and 20,000 support staff’ were taken out of the picture.

In an interview with the MEN, GMP’s Chief Constable Ian Hopkins said that despite the fact numbers were ‘at the lower end of reasonable’, police were more likely to get information from social media, these days, than on the street. Nevertheless, the view from inside some Muslim communities is that neighbourhood policing builds a trust that officials from Prevent - the government’s anti-terror drive, has failed to build.

“Thousands of officers who had built up relationships with the community were given voluntary redundancy”, Mohammed Shafiq, from Rochdale-based Muslim organisation the Ramadhan Foundation said. “Now you have Prevent officers in the community, but when you say you’re a Prevent officer people shut down and don’t want to hear.”

Others defend the programme.

“The counter-extremism strategy has help foil dozens and dozens of major terror plots until this one - Prevent has been largely very successful”, Dr Usama Hasan, of the Quilliam Foundation, told the MEN.

(Image: PA)

“At least 150 people have been stopped from going to Syria and been persuaded, through monitoring schemes, that they are holding bad ideas.

“The problem has been that Muslim communities have not cooperated with Prevent as much as they could have done, partly due to the suspicion and paranoia and fear of being targeted, but also because of a well-orchestrated campaign by extremists in the Muslim community, who have been enabled by naive, but well-meaning people in the wider British society, particularly on the left, who don’t realise that anti-Prevent campaigning can be led by terrorist sympathisers within the Muslim community.”

Either way, Salman Abedi - despite claims his extremist views had been reported in various capacities - was not known to the Prevent scheme. Claims are now swirling that opportunities were missed to stop Abedi – including reports that foreign security officials tipped off UK counterparts that he posed some kind of threat.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has confirmed that Abedi was ‘known up to a point by the intelligence services’. Defence officials have said that at any one time, they will be dealing with thousands of suspects and hundreds of investigations.

Some are bound to blame the fact that security forces grapple with such a workload on UK foreign policy decisions. Comedian Frankie Boyle, not known for mincing his words, put it this way in his BBC show, New World Order: “Keeping us safe is so low on our government’s list of priorities. So Blair, before the Iraq War he’s told it will increase terrorism, he stands up in the House of Commons and goes this will make us safer from terrorism. Cameron’s told before he goes into Libya this will increase terrorism, he stands up in the House of Commons and says this will keep us safer from terrorism. They’re safe from terrorism, like Tony Blair’s got armed guards outside his house and he doesn’t even live in a rough area.”

Joking aside, are we living with the consequences of foreign policy blowback? Is Libya the latest in a series of interventions to make us more vulnerable?

The debate about the west's role in Libya goes on, while our city faces a challenge

The Foreign Affairs Select Committee’s report - published in September, months before the Manchester bomb, was clear that failures of policy under David Cameron’s leadership had made a morass of Libya.

In words that will seem prescient if investigators establish clear links between Salman Abedi, Libyan ISIS or another Islamist group enabled by Gaddafi's fall, select committee chair Crispin Blunt said that the results of ‘ill-conceived’ military action were ‘still playing out today’, when political, rather than military engagement could have protected civilians and delivered regime change and reform at ‘lesser cost to the UK and Libya.’

“There is a debate about whether that intervention was necessary and on what basis it was taken, but having been achieved, the whole business then elided into regime change and then we had no proper appreciation of what was going to happen in the event of regime change, no proper understanding of Libya, and no proper plan for the consequences”, Blunt said.

Islamist militants like Islamic State have been able to arm themselves with Gaddafi’s vast stockpiles of weapons - stockpiles the West failed to secure. This failure has ‘fuelled instability in Libya and enabled and increased terrorism across North and West Africa and the Middle East’, the select committee found.

However Dr Omar Ashour, of the University of Exeter’s Insitutute of Arab and Islamic Studies, says the UK had for many years been faced with ‘state-sponsored terror’ from the Gaddafi regime, and rejects the idea the UK’s intervention was a failure. He also thinks the authorities have done a good job of preventing terror in the UK.

“To be fair the security services were successful in degrading the terrorism threat in the UK for 12 years, we went from the 7/7 bombings to terrorists trying to use kitchen knives to stab people”, he said.

“In many ways the intervention in Libya was a significant success, as was 12 years of degrading the terror threat against the UK, at a time when we see similar things happening around Europe, where there are also well-qualified security systems, but the UK has been doing better”, he added.

Certainly the intervention was a success in getting rid of Gaddafi. But the persistence of the Libyan jihadist movement - with its historic connections to al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other radical jihadist groups with a similar world view - presents a problem. Days after Abedi’s attack, seven were killed and 48 were injured in a terror attack in London Bridge.

One of the attackers, Rachid Redouane, is believed to have fought with Libyan Islamists against Gaddafi before being dispatched to Syria, and then returning to the UK and staging an atrocity. Salman Abedi is suspected of having done exactly the same thing.

From Salman Abedi’s story a picture emerges - one in which the world of some Libyan Islamist dissidents in Manchester and the world’s most notorious terrorists were linked. A picture which suggests that even if ISIS had never existed, he was destined to be an extremist. It’s a picture which suggests its perhaps not all that surprising that disaffected Abedi, angry and not too bright, having been inculcated in the language of jihad, became a ‘homegrown’ terrorist. Not least since by the time Salman Abedi was at university, extremist clerics were urging youngsters to fight jihad in their own backyard, a number of his peers from the neighbourhood had joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and violent, radical Islamism was in the ascendant in war-torn Libya.

(Image: Steve Allen)

What is undoubted is that the attack in Manchester was met with horror from across the world - including from across the broad spectrum of Greater Manchester’s Muslim community, from liberal moderates to fundamentalist Salafists.

And, what Abedi’s dreadful history shows is that some things cannot be achieved by policing alone. Throughout the course of his life, Abedi appears to be worked on by a number of close influences. The challenge then becomes how to tackle those influences against the odds, without entrenching resentment, division, and curbing the liberty we hold dear. The challenge is to make sure that everyone in our diverse society understands that peaceable difference of opinion, of belief and culture is fine, but hatred and violence are not.