Whilst we’re on the subject, a couple of other terrorism things. Kingpin of Comedy Gladio, intimate of Patrick Mercer MP, and self-made spy Glen Jenvey has been arrested, ironically on charges of inciting hatred against Jews. He’s finally convinced somebody that he’s a real jihadi! Not that he’s likely to convince anyone else of anything at all…except Tories. The government must, indeed, look at these coincidences!
Meanwhile, in this season of prodigies, Ed Husain astonishingly says something quite sensible.
In both Britain and America demands for profiling all Muslims at airports are increasing in volume. This mindset not only fails to understand that most Muslims around the world detest al-Qaeda, but this outlook also cannot comprehend how terrorists are always one step ahead of the game. If it is Muslim-sounding names that are to be stopped, would a name like Richard Reid – the infamous shoe bomber – have been detected? If it is Asian men that are to be stopped, then we will see an increase in white men recruited for terror?
After all, al-Qaeda’s English spokesperson is Adam Gadahn, a white American. If it is men who are stopped, we will see women terrorists emerge. Let us not forget Palestinian groups’ repeated use of single women as suicide bombers. Do not underestimate the power of terrorists to recruit serving airline pilots and other aviation personnel. Where there is a will, there will always be a way.
The profiling of ordinary Muslims not only opens other avenues for al-Qaeda, but results in the harassment and potential loss of support from the very people we need on our side to contain al-Qaeda: ordinary Muslims.
He also spends quite a lot of time romanticising Sufism, retailing whines about Obama bowing to the Saudi king, and saying things like this:
Nearly a decade after 9/11, when compared with military budgets, where is investment in these soft-power, counter radicalisation projects? The silence says it all.
Indeed it does, indeed it does. Strangely, he didn’t include a PayPal DONATE button. But it’s a start, I suppose, and we should reward good behaviour when we see it, even from the wanktank community. We Are Reasonable People, after all.
Someone who isn’t reasonable, however, is Con Coughlin:
It is easy to imagine that the authorities at UCL took quiet pride in the fact that they had a radical Nigerian Muslim running their Islamic Society. You can’t get more politically correct than that? They would therefore have had little interest in monitoring whether he was using a British university campus as a recruiting ground for al-Qaeda terrorists such as himself. The authorities at UCL should hang their heads in shame – or better than that, perhaps they should resign?
It may be easy to imagine that, but what are your offensive imaginings doing in something that claims to be a newspaper? Good job you only imagined it or else you could have been sued. It’s a bit like adumbrating that way.
Did Con Coughlin, perhaps, imagine the story about those Iraqi chemical weapons that he reckoned would fit on RPGs and be issued to air defence personnel so they could be launched in 45 minutes? The truth was considerably worse than that.