Posted on 07/10/2005 2:48:10 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
One way of measuring any terrorist attack is to look at whether the killers accomplished everything they set out to. On Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida set out to hijack four planes and succeeded in seizing every one. Had the killers attempted to take another 30 jets between 7:30 and 9 that morning, who can doubt that they'd have maintained their pristine 100 percent success rate? Throughout the IRA's long war against the British Crown, two generations of politicians pointed out that there would always be the odd ''crack in the system'' through which the determined terrorist would slip. But on 9/11 the failure of the system was total.
Thursday, al-Qaida hit three London Underground trains and one bus. Had they broadened their attentions from the Central Zone, had they attempted to blow up 30 trains across the furthest reaches of the Tube map, from Uxbridge to Upminster, who can doubt that they too would have been successful? In other words, the scale of the carnage was constrained only by the murderers' ambition and their manpower.
The difference is that 9/11 hit out of the blue -- literally and politically; 7/7 came after four years of Her Majesty's government prioritizing terrorism and ''security'' above all else -- and the failure rate was still 100 percent. After the Madrid bombing, I was struck by a spate of "comic" security breaches in London: two Greenpeace guys shin up St. Stephen's Tower at the Palace of Westminster, a Daily Mirror reporter bluffs his way into a servant's gig at Buckingham Palace a week before Bush comes to stay; an Osama lookalike gatecrashes Prince William's birthday party. As I wrote last March: "History repeats itself: farce, farce, farce, but sooner or later tragedy is bound to kick in. The inability of the state to secure even the three highest-profile targets in the realm -- the queen, her heir, her Parliament -- should remind us that a defensive war against terrorism will ensure terrorism.''
To three high-profile farces, we now have that high-profile tragedy, of impressive timing. The jihad, via one of its wholly owned but independently operated subsidiaries, scheduled an atrocity for the start of the G-8 summit and managed to pull it off -- at a time when the ports and airports and internal security of a small island were all supposed to be on heightened alert. That's quite a feat. The only good news is that the bombs were, by the standards of what's out there, small. One day they won't be.
Of course, many resources had been redeployed to Scotland to cope with elderly rocker Sir Bob Geldof's pathetic call for a million anti-globalist ninnies to descend on the G-8 summit and tie up the police with their pitiful narcissist preening: the papier-mache Bush and Blair puppets, the ersatz ethnic drumming, etc.
The choice for Britons now is whether they wish to be Australians post-Bali or Spaniards post-Madrid. That shouldn't be a tough call. But it's easy to stand before a news camera and sonorously declare that "the British people will never surrender to terrorism.'' In reality, unless it's clear a threat is primal, most democratic peoples and their political leaders prefer to regard bad news as a peripheral nuisance which can be negotiated away to the fringe of their concerns.
That's what Britain thought in the 1930s -- back when Hitler was slavering over Czechoslovakia, and Neville Chamberlain dismissed it as "a faraway country of which we know little." Today, the faraway country of which the British know little is Britain itself. Traditional terrorists -- the IRA, the Basque separatists -- operate close to home. Islamism projects itself long-range to any point of the planet with an ease most G-8 militaries can't manage. Small cells operate in the nooks and crannies of a free society while the political class seems all but unaware of their existence.
Did we learn enough, for example, from the case of Omar Sheikh? He's the fellow convicted of the kidnapping and beheading in Karachi, Pakistan, of the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl. He's usually described as "Pakistani" but he is, in fact, a citizen of the United Kingdom, with as English a resume as you can get: born in Whips Cross Hospital, educated at Nightingale Primary School in Wanstead, the Forest School in Snaresbrook and the London School of Economics. He travels on a British passport.
Or take Abdel Karim al-Tuhami al-Majati, a senior al-Qaida member from Morocco killed by Saudi security forces in al Ras last April. One of al-Majati's wives is a Belgian citizen currently residing in Britain. In Pakistan, the jihadists speak openly of London as the terrorist bridgehead to Europe. Given the British jihadists who've been discovered in the thick of it in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Israel, Chechnya and Bosnia, only a fool would believe they had no plans for anything closer to home -- or, rather, "home."
Most Britons can only speculate at the degree of Islamist penetration in the United Kingdom because they simply don't know, and multicultural pieties require that they keep themselves in the dark. It's not just the British left that's been skeptical of Washington's war on terror. Former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and many other Conservative grandees have been openly scornful of the Bush doctrine. Lord Hurd would no doubt have preferred a policy of urbane aloofness, such as he promoted vis-a-vis the Balkans in the early '90s. He's probably still unaware that Omar Sheikh was a Westernized non-observant chess-playing pop-listening beer-drinking English student until he was radicalized by the massacres of Bosnian Muslims.
Abdel Karim al-Tuhami al-Majati was another Europeanized Muslim radicalized by the 250,000 corpses of Bosnia. The fact that most of us were unaware of the consequences of EU lethargy on Bosnia until that chicken policy came home to roost a decade later should be sobering: It was what Donald Rumsfeld, in a remark mocked by many snide media twerps, accurately characterized as an "unknown unknown": a vital factor so successfully immersed you don't even know you don't know it.
This is the beginning of a long existential struggle. It's hard not to be moved by the sight of Londoners calmly going about their business as usual in the face of terrorism. But, if the political class goes about business as usual, that's not a stiff upper lip but a suicide cult. The question now is will the British return to the fantasy agenda of Bob Geldof or avenge their dead?
UK has made their country a launching pad for all terrorists. It is time for the people of the UK to tell their government that the Political Correctness is going to kill them all. It is pure foolishness.
I like how he weaved in the Live 8 garbage.
Steyn on target, as per usual.
Hitchens has a better take on this. He says there's nobody to negotiate with or even surrender to to stop this crap. The only thing that would stop the terrorists is for the West to become Wahhabi, which is obviously just not going to happen.
So, in the long run, the terrorists will destroy themselves by eventually convincing even the most insane leftists, even the French and Spanish, that there is no alternative but to destroy the terrorists. The sad thing is that this point will probably not be reached until after a nuke goes off in DC, London or Paris.
I'm sure the ankle-biters would love to atone for the sins of our culture by surrendering, but they can't.
Great article. Reversing the trend, i.e. getting these troublesome groups to go back to the Middle East, is going to be a whole lot more painful than letting them in was. The British government took the path of least resistance, and now they're paying for it.
How many of these are illegals? If they are, could that be used as a reason to ship large groups of people back out? Are many of them on the public dole? I have a hard time believing that most of these people are productive, hard-working British citizens.
I have to wonder if the U.S. will actually make note and learn from the British plight, and try to ensure that we severely limit and monitor immigration, legal and illegal, from the Middle East.
Unfortunately, that train has left the station. If a white man stands up and says what he thinks about race relations or homosexuality in England, just as in every other European country and Canada, he will be locked up in prison by the multi-culti commissars for "inciting hatred." These are no longer societies with freedom of speech. (Of course, members of the Religion of Peace are allowed to say anything they like.)
-ccm
BUMP!
John Kerry anyone?
Kent great post!
I think for the Brits it is a case of too little too late. They have way too many fasists inside the gate, I hope I am wrong but the leftists aren't goin to change their position, only use the attacks to scream for peace.
They may get an idea of what is going on when they are bowing to Allah or risk being beheaded.
Steyn bump
Anyone ever see Dirk Bogard's "The Servant"? Passivity can cost you all that you hold dear.
We are on a path of national suicide. In our insanity, we, and the Brits, would rather let our nations be blown up than act upon the obvious but politically INcorrect need to stop these barbarians from ever coming into our countries.
We cannot possibly stop Islamists from entering our countries even though it is they who kill us.
With that mindset, we deserve to die.
Of the real number of 60-80,000 (confirmed by unbiased UN personnel on the ground), half were Serb natives of the province of Bosnia and half were Slavic Muslim natives of Bosnia plus thousands of foreign Islamic terrorist forces. xxx-president Clinton is the man who made it possible for there to be a radical Islamic state in the heart of Europe, and I am proud of the Serbs for standing up no matter what lying propaganda he promoted.
To blame the Christians of Yugoslavia for what the Islamic fanatics have been intending to do for over a thousand years is ignorant.
So you basically say you want to abolish our freedom to read or not to read??? Is that what you want? Tell me! I´m curious to learn your ideas of freedom. ;-)
Excellent piece. What drove me crazy, watching reporters go on about 'standing tough', 'we've taken worse than this', 'remember the Blitz!', etc., is that much more than standing tough is needed, and I'm not sure British people understand this. They have to clean house, and it's not just a British problem. Europe is a breeding ground for Muslim terrorism, and posturing, merely talking tough and doing nothing will only beget bigger explosions and greater loss of life.
The trojan horse is in every major city world wide. We will see who has the political will to turn them out.For Londoners I don't believe that Red Ken has the right stuff.
Me, too! That G-8 summit was as usual, irrelevant. Posturing, and a recycling of old ideas that won't work. As Jesus said, 'The poor will always be with you.' The trick is to help them help themselves. Education, getting them to think beyond tribalism. As for PC ridden Britain and the EU, God help us all.
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