Thursday, December 11, 2014

UK weather warning: thought crimes and imminent immigrant terror on the rise

I've almost grown tired of writing about it, but when and where will it all stop? Can't we have an early election to save ourselves from more aerial bombardment (via the airwaves) with rhetoric intended to frighten the British public into supporting an incompetent and untenable government? Of course, it's not the unnecessary and excessive national debt or the bail-out to the banks on which tax payers' hard-earned money was spent which resulted in spending cuts elsewhere, it's immigrants who come here for the sole purpose of cashing in on those generous benefits that have already been taken away from us all! Of course, it's not the spy cameras expensively installed every hundred metres of road network with a view to trying to make motorists pay more than their fair share into local and national government coffers that we should be afraid of, it's terrorists endlessly scheming to take away the freedoms our government has already curtailed! The coming election is fought by a bankrupt Tory party on UKIP territory, and since both Labour and Liberals have been completely discredited by their contribution to the previous and this government respectively, a Tory-UKIP coalition may well be the likely outcome, so Cameron, that patronising public schoolboy face reading his worn-out script might be able to cling to a slice of power after all.

Whilst he might be able to salvage some of his personal fortunes, the damage to British society will be irreversible. The Department of Education, following on from its Trojan Horse fiasco, issued new guidelines that schools must actively promote British values, and names these as "democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths and beliefs". Democracy - it would be nice if we could have some please! A simple right of veto of the most unpopular government policies would even do. Rule of law - the court system is in shambles and most people can no longer afford justice whilst increasingly laws are being replaced by administrative orders and cases are being decided in camera. Individual liberty - not even at home with "my home is my castle" being replaced with encouragement to "spy on your neighbour", after all, they might be illegal immigrants, benefit frauds or potential terrorists. Finally, mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths and beliefs - who writes this stuff? The whole country is on a witch hunt demonising Muslims. The entire security industry is built on suspicion and fear of the other. So if these are core British values, then the British Isles are adrift in the ocean and about to sink for good.

Today, a 35-year-old woman in Luton has been jailed in excess of 5 years for posting opinions and pictures on facebook. She was charged with "terrorism" offences after an undercover police officer encouraged her to boast a little more about what she might want to do as part of her jihad fantasies. The judge decided that she was guilty of radicalising others, more so given that she had pictures with her children posing with toy guns and swords. Meanwhile mothers up and down the country are busy buying guns and war games for their children as Christmas presents. Better not take pictures with them holding those! You never know who gets hold of them and how they might be used against you.
The hypocrisy of it all - was the undercover police officer charged for radicalising this woman? Will the British government face charges for having covertly and openly intervened in Syria as a sovereign nation state and having encouraged people to get involved until the tide turned against them? Are the media going to be charged for the gruesome pictures of weapons in action they show us daily in order to keep us on our toes? But justice has been done, and the tax payer can foot a bill in excess of £200k to keep a woman locked up who did not pose any real threat to anyone, whilst burglars, sex offenders and pedophiles (including within the echelons of power), murderers and other criminals go unpunished due to a lack of police resources which have all been allocated into criminalising motorists, because that's where the revenue is, and Muslims, because it pays political dividends.

Don't get me wrong. Extremism and radicalisation exist in every community. As Muslims we have our sad share of hotheads and narrow-minded fanatics, many of whom make life unbearable for ordinary worshippers at the mosque by appointing themselves as a kind of religious thought police instructing women on their dress code and men on the length of their beards. We have learnt to ignore them, but the media love to put them back on a pedestal and give them publicity. And the police and their failed Prevent strategy thrive on them as it allows them to justify their own existence: look, see, there are people with terrorist minds and inclinations in our midst, so when you pay our salaries to keep you safe it's money well spent.

In fact, this kind of extremism is state-sponsored. It is sponsored by the Saudi-financed Salafi movement working for dominance in Saudi-financed mosques. It is sponsored by the CIA (don't mention torture, it's an anti-terrorism device and hence cannot be a crime) who created the movement in first place as a useful tool to create strive in countries in whose politics they want to interfere. And it is sponsored by the British government with many of them on the MI5 and MI6 payroll in order to keep the terror threat alive by means of entrapment. Once you remove the terror convictions which were due to either thought crimes or incitement by undercover agents or the guilty pleas achieved by the threat of extradition to the United States the actual threat diminishes into insignificance. Hang on, they will say, people have lost their lives or been injured in attacks inspired by Islamic extremist views. Leaving aside whether 7/7 was an inside job or not, we're talking a handful of casualties. IRA attacks caused slightly more casualties than that, but dear not call it Catholic or Christian terror. Our armed forces are responsible for an even larger number of casualties in wars in places most people can't even pronounce as well as the deaths of uncountable foreign civilians - state terror comes to mind. Following that, ordinary muggings resulting in death are much higher up the list as are death due to alcohol-related crimes. If we look at road accidents, the numbers go through the roof, but are in themselves dwarfed by diabetes and cancer. I'm not trying to trivialise ideologically motivated crimes, but for anybody looking at the real world it should be shamefully apparent that the excessive focus of politicians and media on so-called Islamic terror threat is highly imbalanced and disproportionate. So not only has our government lost British values, it has also lost touch with reality.

But there is, of course, system to their madness. This focus channels the frustration of British citizens against an perceived external threat, the immigrant, and an enemy within, the Muslim, rather than the government or its employers, the banks. And amidst repeated calls for making cuts and the reality of unemployment and eviction from their own homes, Brits will turn to the demagogues with the strong words to protect them against those aliens at the gates and in their midst. This is election campaigning on a grand scale, which brings me back to the beginning: if we can't democracy anyway, can we possibly bring the elections forward and save ourselves all that drama?