With The Queen’s Speech tomorrow and Gordon Brown intent on ramping through 2 month detention without trial for Muslims, the traditional ceremony has been performed of wheeling out the Head of MI5 in advance of the Queen’s Speech to tell terrible lies about the extent of the terror threat. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6149726.stmJonathan “Pinnochio” Evans tells us there are 2,000 potential terrorists in the UK – and then throws in casually that it could be double that.
That is plainly bollocks. it is far too high a figure. The IRA – who were much more persistent and lethal terrorists in the UK – had a membership in the 80’s, when at the height of their bombing campaign, of about 90 actual terrorists. The current 2,000 clearly have severe productivity problems by comparison.
Any genuine security expert will tell you that Evans’ figures are far too high. Assuming the large majority of these “terrorists” are adult male, that means according to Evans at least one in every 150 adult male Muslims in the UK is a terrorist, and at his higher surmise signifcantly more than one in a hundred. Plainly, to anyone who actually meets any Muslims, that is impossible.
Unfortunately, there is no shortage of “Security consultants” who make a fat living from exaggerating the threat of terrorism and then advising on how to counter it. The BBC usually has no problem finding up this kind of so called “Security expert” to reinforce the ludicrous scare. Today the BBC rolled out Dr Sally Leivesley – who they failed to point out is Managing Director of “Newrisk Ltd”, an archetype of those seeking to make money from spreading fear.
And they have the ever reliable Frank Gardner. Chiselled profile held high, impeccable hair swept back, upper lip stiff, poppy impeccably in place, Gardner can be relied upon to retail any absolute rubbish the security services spew out without the slightest danger of passing it through a filter of independent thought. He can also be relied on to produce a meaningless graphic to illustrate the most ludicrous of propositions.
To date his finest hour was when 250 police stormed a house at Forest Gate and shot a completely innocent young postman as he got out of bed. The police explained that they were searching for a “Chemical weapons vest”.
There has never, ever been a “chemical weapons vest”, anywhere in the World. The very concept is nonsense – the point of a chemical weapon is to achieve maximum dispersal of the chemical, and wrapping it in fabric around the human torso would be ludicrous. That is why there has never been a chemical weapons vest.
Nonetheless the noble, earnest Gardner introduced a graphic of what a chemical weapons vest might look like – a laughable photo of a camouflage pattern waistcoat full of suspicious bumps and loops. He might just as well have labelled it a nuclear bomb vest. What a farce! What a wanker!
Anyway, Gardner was at it again tonight with a graphic to explain the latest ludicrous claims. How do they know there are 2,000 terrorists, he asked? Well, they can’t tell us because it’s intelligence, he explained. But the helpful graphic fills the screen, with hundreds of sinister black silhouettes of unknown terrorists, interconnected by numerous black lines indicating networks, nodes and axes of evil. And to explain it all, every so often, there was a not blacked out figure, a suicide bomber or, glowering at us, Osama Bin Laden. Of course!! That’s the evidence!! There really are thousands of them.
I was going to retaliate by producing a graphic of thousands of sinister silhouettes linked by criss-crossing lines, and dotted among them Goebbels, Hitler, Attila the Hun, Stalin, Mao and Frank Gardner. But I can’t be bothered – sounds like a job for Bloggerheads.
The truth is that since September 11 Islamic militants have killed about 70 people in the UK. That’s 12 people a year in a country of 60 million. Every death is terrible, but a threat to our existence it is not. You have a much better chance of drowning in your own bath, of being struck by lightning or of winning the national lottery than of being killed by a terrorist. But that wouldn’t persuade you to give up your civil liberties, or that we have to invade more oil rich countries for our security.
Craig,
I think in the current climate your ironic stance on the terrorist threat to our country is pretty wide of the mark! It's clever people like you, and your ilk, that undermine our will and ability to defend ourselves. Maybe one day someone will give you the kind of answer you really deserve, and you'll have brought it on yourself.
I had no idea I was taking my life in my hands when I had a bath. I knew it was dangerous to wash too much, but that much! I intend, as precaution, to limit the number of baths I take to the absolute minimum in future, until the terrorist threat has abated. I'm sure these phenomenon are connected in some way or another.
I don't intend to bathe alone from now on, and I advise you, and your beautiful wife, to do the same.
All this fear is getting very confusing. There are so many things to fear.
Perhaps the government could give us a fear list, from 1 to 10, of the things we should fear most. Then we'd know where we are, and could start some serious and structured fearing without having to worry about whether we're fearing about entirely the wrong thing.
Which government minister should be in charge of Fear?
Craig,
Let's be honest. Frank Gardner is a complete arse. His reports are usually toe-curlingly embarrassing but they do serve a useful purpose in showing us what nonsense the state wants us to believe. Whatever Frank says is unlikely to be the truth, so we know to look elsewhere. From that perspective, he's actually a useful guy to have on the box and ironically might therefore be worthy of a medal for "Services to Truth".
Of course, the fact that the Beeb employs him and, I assume, even pays him a salary for his egregious propaganda tells us much about the Beeb.
I read "Murder in Samarkand" some time ago and was struck by how diplomats actually don't always have an inside track on much of what actually goes on. I'm thinking in particular of how people in the diplomatic sphere seemed to believe that there actually is a "War on Terror" – or at least parroted suitable phrases in a convinced manner. You seemed as much recipients/victims of tha barrage of propaganda as the man on the street. Somehow I thought it would be different. The channels of dissemination may vary but the lies are ultimately still the same.
EmmArr
"The current 2,000 clearly have severe productivity problems by comparison"
I'll say, 2000 terrorists, 30 plots = 53ish terrorists/plot.
Some retraining needed.
What can I say? This almost completely matches my own experience and ideas.
However, I would dispute the statement "The truth is that since September 11 Islamic militants have killed about 70 people in the UK. That's 12 people a year in a country of 60 million".
The authorities have seen fit not to release any evidence of any kind that would stand scrutiny in a court of law about the 7 July/21 July Affairs.
They have even failed to establish that the four Muslims they fingered were even at Luton railway station on the day in question (the bad photo released seems to show the ground being wet, when the day was dry), let alone being in London.
They certainly couldn't have caught the necessary train (which the authorities said in fact they did) as it was cancelled.
So, at the very least we are entitled to be extremely sceptical about any of their claims, given their track record of official lying.
However, even if one concedes the 70 per 60M for a moment, let us compare it with the Northern Irish Troubles.
In 32 years, 3,312 (maybe more) people were killed in Ulster and the UK mainland, most of them by the IRA and its fractions, and most of that funded by the USA which still refuses to hand over a couple of PIRA people because their actions, it says, were "not terroristic" but "political".
Nevertheless, this actual carnage did not produce the curtailment of our ancient liberties that the notional "Islamic terrorism" has – nor was there any raids on Catholic churches, arrests of Catholic priests (and there were many who were deeply involved with PIRA), closing downs of Catholic charities, demonisation in the media of Catholics generally, or even of the average Irishman or woman.
So what, or who, is driving this hysterical anti-Islamism? And why?