Here are some real terrorists
When people in Britain these days think of terrorism, they usually mean so-called Islamic terrorism, specifically al-Qa’ida, or Palestinians attacking Israelis. In this country, a real terrorist campaign has been going on, in which animal rights fanatics carry out campaigns of intimidation against people connected to vivisection companies like Huntingdon Life Sciences, even where the vivisection is for medical research and not for things like cosmetics. They vandalise people’s cars, they attack people’s houses in the middle of the night, and they attack anyone even remotely related to the suppliers, and their families. They also write scurrilous letters calling people paedophiles, among other things.
Their campaigns are aimed at ostracising these people from their communities. One family which ran a farm which (among other things) bred guinea pigs for medical research ended up being refused business by one local business after another – the pub, the hotel, the newsagent, the window cleaner, the solicitor, the golf course – by people caving in to terrorism. According to this report, the upshot of this has been that their farming activities are now more concentrated on the guinea pigs than they originally were. But it’s caused an enormous amount of fear in the community surrounding the farm.
Hate campaigns obviously cannot be compared with massive terrorist attacks, but they are easier to carry out and there are many more of them. But listening to this report got me thinking that Muslims in this country have yet to resort to even this kind of terrorism. We have a few pickets of Marks & Spencer, but there have been no physical attacks on the companies which are known to support Israel, let alone on their suppliers. Dan Verton’s book Black Ice: The Invisible Threat of Cyber-Terrorism (McGraw-Hill / Osborne, 2003) makes various claims about Muslim virus writers in Malaysia and shows pictures of websites defaced by groups of Muslim “hackers” (in the tech community they are called crackers, something this book doesn’t mention, surprisingly for a book published by a major computer book publisher), but this activity is widely known about and Muslims are a minority of those doing it.
Given that we don’t have an organised “Muslim underground” in this country, unlike the animal rights fanatics who are actually able to launch attacks, how on earth is any serious terrorist campaign to get off the ground in the UK? The persistent arrests of young Muslim men in the UK, and the fact that we have never had a real attack, suggests that the situation of the so-called British arm of al-Qa’ida is one of four things:
- It is composed entirely of exceptionally stupid people.
- It has a mole within it, perhaps a conscientious Muslim who doesn’t agree with the methods being used.
- It has an MI5/MI6/Special Branch agent provocateur within it similar to Freddie “Stakeknife” Scappaticci.
- It doesn’t exist, and the various arrests are false and politically motivated (this is my hunch).
I have to say, I walk regularly in central London and I’m rarely afraid of anything, least of all terrorism. Remember, this country has had no attacks by al-Qa’ida types within the UK; the only major attacks were Lockerbie and the Iranian embassy hostage incident. Of course, if you know of an attack being planned, do something about it. But don’t let unreasonable fear cloud your reasoning and don’t sign your liberties away because of a “threat” which may not exist.
