Posted on 08/01/2005 2:15:57 PM PDT by alpowolf
We are still here. We still live, work and play. We can vote. We can travel where we want, meet whom we choose, say what we like. We still enjoy due process of law. The only absurdity is that in the eighth year of the government of Tony Blair we need to remark on these facts. I do so not because some fanatics have bombed London. We have, most of us, been there before. I do so because in the three weeks since the attacks began a howling mob has clambered aboard the terrorists’ bandwagon and claimed right of passage. They are taking the opportunity to beat their political pectorals, roar abuse at all and sundry and cloak prejudice in the dogma of necessity. Whatever their motives, the objective is the same as that of the terrorist. It is to multiply fear, restrict liberty and sow seeds of hatred.
Urban terrorism can only be treated as a crime. Conspiring to explode devices in public places endangers life, destroys property and causes public nuisance. Like all criminal effects it has causes. A sensible democracy addresses those causes. But since ordinary citizens and even the police can do little about them in the short term, they rightly concentrate on the crime itself. The streets of London are alive with like dangers, with people who shoot, kill and maim dozens of people a year. We fight them all, whatever their proffered and spurious justification.
So what purpose was served last week by police crying, “They’re still out there and trying to get you”? What good are daily briefings on “the inevitability” of another attack? Street killings are inevitable, too. Apart from the gratuitous damage to public confidence and business, why stoke the very fears, hatreds and antagonisms that the bombers want stoked? Just get on and find the bombers, without publicising their allegedly awesome power to deflect blame from any deficiencies in public safety. Half the British Establishment seems to have signed up to the League of Friends of Terrorism.
That some London passengers were sadly killed earlier this month does not put the security of the British state at risk. I have a higher respect for that security than most people seem to have. Britain is not at war just because some Arab says so. No amount of tabloid hysteria — or tabloid government — should make it otherwise. No city can be immune to bombs but that does not subvert democracy and engender a state of emergency. Anyone who pretends otherwise is an accessory to the terrorism itself.
After 9/11 the Americans, with characteristic rigour, revealed that the catastrophe was a result not of some lack of federal power but chiefly executive incompetence. I trust Britain will ask the same questions. Given the resources poured into Britain’s police and security services — more than any other country in Europe — Britons are entitled to ask how this month’s disaster occurred.
Could it be that recent home secretaries have preferred to set the police easier priorities, such as catching drug users and speeding motorists? Why have they devoted half of all police time to bureaucracy and so little to walking the streets in ethnic minority areas, getting their ears to the ground and penetrating possibly dissident groups? If there were a similar collapse in the health or education service, ministers would never be allowed the claim that it was absolutely nothing to do with them.
Last week’s reaction to the Stockwell shooting was likewise a national disgrace. The police claimed the right to follow a suspect across town and kill him in cold blood. Rather than instantly admit a terrible mistake, it demanded and got the instant, cringing and unqualified support of all “right-thinking people”. What would such people say if the police used their machineguns to mow down an entire group of dark-skinned people “thinking they might be engaged in terrorism”? Terrorism is turning Britain into a banana republic. It is centuries since we cheered a public lynching. If terrorists want evidence of how easy it is to reduce Britain to a crude police state, they need only study the Stockwell shooting.
The truth is that those who want to subvert freedom can always rely on “useful idiots”, a phrase Lenin is said to have used of liberal apologists for extremists (but never did). Modern terrorism neatly inverts this attribution. It relies on “useful idiots” of the right to exploit any terrorist incident to foment xenophobia, suspend civil liberties and seek revenge from any ethnic group vaguely linked to the incident.
Terrorism’s “useful idiots” have had a field day this past fortnight. They have jumped from “nothing can justify the bombing” (true) to “nothing can explain the bombing” (absurd). They have jumped from “Britain’s war in Iraq is no excuse for killing innocent Londoners” (true) to “Britain’s war in Iraq has nothing to do with the bombing” (palpably absurd). They jump from “we must not be driven to alter our way of life” (true) to demanding that we do just that. The “useful idiots” demand new powers, new restrictions and new measures against the Muslim community. Above all they declare “war on terror”, turn murderers into warriors and incite Islam to proclaim jihad in response.
In 1998 the Blair government signed up to the European convention on human rights. It did so against the views of many, including myself, who felt that Britain should not need lessons in such rights from outside. Since then I have come round to the 1998 act, in particular its use against the more authoritarian tendencies of the nanny state. But I never thought that its most determined foe would be Blair himself.
In 2001 he suspended habeas corpus and introduced unlimited detention without trial. When told by the law lords, by eight votes to one, last December that this transgressed the human rights convention, he declared that he would defy them and pass new legislation to prove it.
The law lords pointed out that Britain could renege on its human rights commitment, in Lord Bingham’s words, only in “an emergency threatening the life of the nation”. For Blair to suggest that the London bombs threaten the nation’s life (as opposed to British lives) is plausible only if he accepts the fantasies of the bombers themselves. Yet he is offering the bombers just this ludicrous accolade, currently to justify detention without trial, restrictions on free speech and publishing censorship.
On Tuesday Blair abused the judiciary in terms that would do credit to his friend Vladimir Putin. He implied that he would continue to defy the law lords and the human rights convention on the grounds of national emergency, which he claims the exclusive right to define. Last December Lord Hoffmann remarked that Blair’s attacks on human rights were a greater threat to freedom than terrorism itself. Blair wonders menacingly “whether those words would be uttered now”. I sincerely hope they would.
The prime minister is undoubtedly impressive when speaking for the nation in moments of pain. He is unimpressive in articulating what should be its response.
Not so Blair’s wife. Also last Tuesday Cherie Booth went out of her way (a long way, to Malaysia) to support the abused judges. At moments like this, she said, “it is all too easy to respond in a way that undermines commitment to our most deeply held values”. She disagreed with her husband’s view that judges should change their minds when public opinion was in a state of shock. It is when terror and division reign, she said, that judicial independence “is universally recognised as a cardinal feature of the modern democratic state”.
The government has not even begun to prove that the London bombs resulted from legislative impotence rather than from its own incompetence or some unavoidable evil. Even if British freedom were in some degree “to blame”, democracy has always known that sometimes it must fight its fights, as Booth said, “with one hand tied behind its back” and yet it wins. It has no need of the wimpish special powers and kangaroo courts of terrorism’s “useful idiots ”. But if politicians dare not defend this principle, then judges must do so. They must not let government “cheapen our right to call ourselves a civilised nation”.
Who can guess the pillow talk at Chequers this weekend? For the time being I can only report the words of the prime minister’s, rightly so-called, better half.
Unfortunately, all it is going to take is one instance of nuclear terrorism taking out a major western city for ALL the arguments about our freedoms and the incremental big-brotherism we are building to be thrown out forever.
The corrupt judges and Red Ken leftists have as much blood on their hands as the IslamoFascist vermin infesting the UK (and the USA).
Alrighty then--looks like the left is finally conceding the fact that their ideology aids and abets terrorism. I'm good with that.
Gee, and here I was thinkin' it was al Qaeda...
'Urban terrorism can only be treated as a crime.'
Brits have a different system of justice. In general you have to wait for a crime to be committed before you look for perps.
They obviously are not satisfied with the current death toll.
This guy is obviously a lib nitwit British style. Absolutely correct instead of "palpably absurd" is what the reality is. These islamic insects would have eventually gotten around to killing Britons in any case. The most that can be said for the Iraq connection is that it gave then a bit of an excuse.
People can in fact have too much freedom. We limit freedom all the time. That's what laws do. They limit the freedoms of idiots and other assorted rot.
With freedom comes responsibility. As a society degenerates into moral and civil anarchy its freedom will be curtailed. It's a fact of life.
Empire #101....?
/OFF Britains worldwide Control of the World's Oil/Gas Refineries?
?British Oil-Tea Tax worldwide?
(Support 'Chinese' Communist Military Oil Exploration Troops?)
Yeah. Arrested by police who can only suggest that if people are frightened by a home intrusion that they hide in the bathroom and dial 911. Enforcing laws passed by a legislature who's biggest anti-crime measure before these attacks was to pass a law making knives illegal. A crime that's tried in the same court as the one that prosecuted a poor farmer for defending himself and his property. Tried by a judge like Lord Hoffman who's far more interested in these madmen's "human rights" than the no longer existing rights of their victims. That's justice for ya.
If this is the kind of people who hold sway in Britain, all is lost. There'll be HUNDREDS more attacks. These peoples' weakness encourages attacks.
The Israelification of Europe according to Steyn.
It's sort of like "closing the (so-called) gun show 'loophole'" in response to Columbine, when the person who bought the guns (Robyn Anderson) was of legal age, had a clean record, and could therefore have passed any check. Not only doesn't it solve the problem even in theory, it intrudes into the firearms transaction privacy of everyone else.
One man's freedom ends where the next man's freedom begins. The failure to apply this principle to Muslims results in the erosion of freedom for all others. According to the terrorism-is-crime philosophy, the freedom of Muslims ends only when a particular individual is convicted of perpetrating a specific act of terror, beyond a reasonable doubt.
There is no freedom when citizens can be killed at random anyplace, anytime. That is not freedom, it's a state of subjugation.
Who is this idiot author? He seems to be unable to make a distinction between domestic terrorists and foreign ones.
Granted, the boundary is increasingly blurred, but clearly, killers traveling the world before stopping long enough to kill hundreds don't quite deserve the constitutional protections of say, a local mentally deficient local lad.
He had it within his power totally, to be still alive merely by either a) stopping when directed, or b) coming into a fereign country legally, making running from police unnecessary.
Under the circumstances, I do hope that the police continue to err on the side of the non-criminal.
I agree, much of the current information/documentation apparatus in reaction to 9/11 is only marginally related to terrorism - furthermore, the nearly-unsecured southern border makes it clear that entry of people and materials via that route is not considered important enough to stop.
I personally like the Wall project in Israel.
Head firmly lodged in the sand nonsense. 15 million of unassimilated Islamic animals in Europe. 3% of British population, close to 10% in London. 50 years ago: zero! Keep importing the towel heads, Simon...
"If the problem is intelligence not being able to talk to law enforcement because of the Gorelik wall, or that Muslim FBI agents won't wiretap other Muslims (or, giving false or incomplete translations of radio intercepts), it isn't either morally correct nor useful to expand FBI power more deeply into the lives of US citizens."
Well said! Here, here!
But the "freedom fighters" (as most of the British call the so-called "Palestinians") are only trying to take their future homeland back from the "occupiers."
[Little epistemological relativism there. Britain, please start supporting Israel against terrorists.]
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