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.